The END of Tech Industry? | Facebook | Meta layoff| Twitter layoff| Amazon Layoff

While some companies have directly let go their employees, others have opted for wait and watch by doing a hiring freeze.
Tech companies of all sizes are getting impacted by this economic downturn.
The future of the tech industry looks more uncertain than ever.

So, what does all of this mean for someone who is about to start their career in the tech industry.

And more importantly, is this the end of the tech industry as we know it?

To answer what the future holds for the tech industry, we first need to understand how we got here in the first place.

And for that, we need to go back to the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 when the entire world economy came to a standstill.

People were losing their jobs everywhere, especially in the hospitality industry.

And to help people who were having a hard time, governments throughout the world started giving out covid relief packages.

And to fund all these packages, the governments printed a lot of money. All this money made its way to the stock market and the stocks of the big tech companies soared which gave them false confidence.

And what did the tech companies do as a result of this?

They started hiring massively.

Meta, which is the biggest culprit in these layoffs doubled its staff in pandemic and hired more than 87,000 new employees. When the entire world was struggling to make the ends meet, the tech industry witnessed something that they called

Great Resignation

During the great resignation, the tech salaries were at their peak. In summary, tech companies increased their size aggressively during the pandemic. Now after the economy recovered from the pandemic, people got their jobs back and everything started going back to normal.

But all the money that was printed still remained in circulation.

More money in the market meant people were willing to pay more money for the same thing. And this led to Inflation.

Economic sanctions on Russia after the Ukraine war further increased the gas prices which led to even more inflation.

To control inflation, the government decided to pull some money back from the market by increasing the interest rates. And less money in the market meant less economic activity.

For companies like Meta and Twitter, it meant less ads spend which make the majority of their profits. Lower earnings meant falling tech stock.

Now, to understand what the short term and long-term future looks like, we need to go back in history. Because increase in interest rates, plummeting tech stocks and mass layoffs is not something new in the tech industry.

In the late nineties, any company with the word “dot com” in its name was getting massive funding from the investors even if the company had no business model and was

losing money.

Sounds familiar?

Due to similar chain of events as today, the “dot com” bubble of the

late nineties burst in the year 1999 and 2000. Tech companies lost 1.75 trillion dollars in value and 22,000 people lost their jobs

at that time as well.

Fast forward to 2022, we are in a very similar situation. But what we need to remember is that even in the dotcom bubble, there were some tech companies that survived the crash.

Some of these companies were Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google.

What was common among the companies that survived the crash was that they had a great product and a solid business model.

So, if history is any indicator of the future, the tech industry is not going anywhere anytime soon.

But we, as tech workers, need to be a little careful in these tough times.
In the short term, it’s going to be harder to find a job in the tech industry.
Most of the major big tech companies are on official or unofficial hiring freeze.
And it’s anyway not a great time to join smaller companies that have fragile business and make no profit.

In the long term however, similar to the dotcom bubble, I expect tech companies with great products and good profit margins to come out stronger than before.

That’s because there is less competition between employers in the current labor market. And good companies that have cash on hand will take this opportunity to hire exceptional

people at lower wages to grow faster than ever.

So, short term it’s going to be tougher for people looking for jobs but long term we will have plenty of tech winners that will pay top dollar for your talent. However, in order to make it in the long-term future, we need to navigate the short term

wisely.

But how do you do that?

I will talk about people looking to start their career in tech in a moment. But, if you are already working in the tech industry, here are a few things you can do to save yourself in these layoffs.

Number one, always be ready to interview.
If you need to brush up on your interviewing skills, do it now.
Number two, keep the communication channels open.
Make sure that you check in with your manager regularly on what leadership is up to and whether there are any plans for the layoffs.